Monday, July 25, 2011

It had to happen: the rise of a “counter-jihadist” terrorist outfit that is the mirror image of al-Qaeda. That it first arose in Norway, rather than, say, in the US, is just a coincidence, although I’m sure Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the Norwegian mass murder in Utoya, has his American collaborators, as he claimed in his manifesto, “2083: A Declaration of European Independence,” [.pdf] and an accompanying video. Indeed, a good many of the sources he cites in “2083″ – which is basically a compendium of previously published works by others – are American. Material from David Horowitz’s website, Frontpagemag.com, figures prominently, along with articles taken verbatim from the Horowitz-affiliated “Jihad Watch,” run by professional hater and make-believe “scholar” Robert Spencer.

Breivik’s “book” is a mishmash, half diary of his careful preparations for the attack thrown together with anti-Muslim materials and boilerplate conservative rhetoric about the importance of faith, family, and community – Breivik lifts an entire section of a screed on “Cultural Conservatism” by the late Paul Weyrich – totaling well over a thousand pages. Thankfully, we don’t have to plough through this disjointed “compendium,” as he calls it – which shows signs of being hastily thrown together in preparation for his international debut as the Norwegian Timothy McVeigh, just like his Facebook page and his Twitter account. Breivik created a much more coherent video version which gives us a lot more clues about why he murdered 90-plus (at last count) of his fellow Norwegians in the name of fighting Islam...

The second part of the video details the threat posed by an inherently aggressive and implacable Islam, the long history of Islamic imperialism, and the submission of the subject peoples to “dhimmitude.” This section relies heavily on the writings of the professional Islamophobes such as Robert Spencer, Bat Ye’or, Andrew G. Bostom, Bernard Lewis, etc., that reads like the table of contents for a routine edition of Horowitz’s online magazine. It is neoconservatism, of the old cold war variety, with the only difference being that International Islam has taken the place of International Communism as our unsleeping foe...

For years, neoconservatives have been telling us the decadent West is no match for the holy warriors of Islam, and what is needed is a revival of the Crusader spirit so that we can defeat our Eternal Enemy once and for all. We in the West must be put on a permanent war footing, they tell us, in order to put “an end to evil,” as two of them put it in a book title. Like the neocons, Breivik and the EDL are staunch supporters of Israel: the Israeli flag flies at EDL rallies, and the Jewish state comes in for undiluted praise in the Knights Templar manifesto.

Before Breivik was identified as the culprit, neocon columnist Jennifer Rubin rushed into print with an assessment by two of her fellow neocon “experts” – Gary Schmitt and Thomas Joscelyn – that this was the work of al-Qaeda, and concluded:

“This is a sobering reminder for those who think it’s too expensive to wage a war against jihadists…. Some irresponsible lawmakers on both sides of the aisle…would have us believe that enormous defense cuts would not affect our national security. Obama would have us believe that al-Qaeda is almost caput and that we can wrap up things in Afghanistan. All of these are rationalizations for doing something very rash, namely curbing our ability to defend the United States and our allies in a very dangerous world.”

Well, it is a sobering reminder, but not in the way Rubin intended: it’s a reminder that ideas have consequences. It’s not surprising someone took neoconservative propaganda seriously enough to go the terrorist route: Breivik is merely carrying out the program advocated by the David Horowitz’s, the Robert Spencers, the Pam Gellers of this sad and sorry world. The one difference is that Breivik and his fellow Knights are taking direct action, without bothering to employ the agency of government...MORE...LINK